What Men Love About Fiftysomething-Year-Old Women

When, for the heck of it, I typed in “What makes a person sexy?” on my browser the other day, I was directed to a “Yahoo! Answers” discussion site. All of the replies were from young men and women whose predictable insights included: “A pretty face, not too chubby,” “Hot body,” “Voluptuous figure” and “Beautiful eyes and a nice body.”

In the midst of these observations was a comment from a young woman named Keiko. It grabbed my attention.

Keiko was baffled at the attention men lavished on a friend of hers at a party. The woman — “in her 50s," Keiko wrote, "chunky, thick ankles, frizzy hair" — was surrounded by "a ring of men hanging on her every word. She obviously was sexy to them.”

Although Keiko didn’t know what these men saw in her older friend, it got my imagination going. I wondered what would happen if I conducted a fantasy exit poll with that woman's admirers.

“Guys," I would ask, "what made you choose a chunky, frizzy-haired fiftysomething over Keiko?”